Velodyne: Eyes on the road. As Velodyne eyes an IPO that could value it in the billions, David Hall, its founder and CEO, still feels most at home tinkering in his electronics lab. Image: Timothy Archibald for Forbes. Seconds after David Hall punches in a code, the electronic gate to his waterfront residence swings open.

It’s a large compound but not the kind you’d expect from a tech entrepreneur who is as responsible as anyone for ushering in the self- driving- car revolution. Hall, 6. 6, is CEO of Velodyne, the leading maker of Li.

DAR sensors, the ‘eyes’ that allow autonomous vehicles to see what’s around them. He lives among a ramshackle collection of low- slung, shingled and metal structures built around a concrete plot on the Bay Area island town of Alameda, California. It’s his favourite refuge, equal parts living quarters and workshop, where this inveterate tinkerer and serial inventor can work on his pet projects. At one end there’s a barn- size industrial shed where Hall and a team of engineers are perfecting one of his latest obsessions: A patented technology that keeps boats steady in the roughest waters.

Marta, his wife and the head of business development at Velodyne, paints and sculpts in an art studio nestled inside another building. A couple of his Ford F- 1. Hall’s home itself is a houseboat, or rather a roomy prefab structure bolted onto a barge. From the living room you can hear small waves lapping at the shores of the sleepy canal that separates Alameda from Oakland. It’s a world away from the bustle and glitz of Silicon Valley, where Velodyne has its headquarters, and that’s the point.

I’ve known about Hoonigan Racing, Ken Block’s motorsport team that competes in FIA World Rallycross as a Ford factory backed team. I even saw them compete at. Forbes Insights is the strategic research and thought leadership practice of Forbes Media. By leveraging proprietary databases of senior-level executives in the.

I’m an engineer,” the reclusive Hall says, referring to both profession and persona. I’m basically an introvert, a nerd ahead of my time.”About a decade ahead of his time.

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In 2. 00. 6, Hall patented one of his inventions—a multi- beam spinning Li. DAR sensor—that put Velodyne, albeit almost accidentally, at the centre of a revolution that’s disrupting the auto and tech industries.

Hall built the Li. DAR sensor on a whim. Velodyne, which he had founded in 1.

But always itching to keep inventing, in the early aughts Hall became obsessed with a seemingly fantastical contest: A Defense Department- sponsored race for autonomous vehicles. It promised to be both fun and an excellent proving ground for his engineering chops. Over a couple of years, Hall refined a roof- mounted Li.

DAR (for “light distance and ranging”) unit consisting of 6. It was revolutionary,” says William “Red” Whittaker, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University and a father of the autonomous- vehicle movement. The races, known as the DARPA Challenges, became the Big Bang event for self- driving cars, and Hall’s Li. DAR forever changed Velodyne from a modest family- run business into a hot commodity: A 3. Today Velodyne is the top supplier of advanced automotive Li. DAR and sells its sensors to virtually every auto and tech company that’s building or testing autonomous vehicles.

GM, Ford, Uber and China’s Baidu are big buyers, and even Caterpillar uses Velodyne’s tech for gargantuan robotic mining trucks. Google has been a major customer for years, though it’s also making its own sensors. No company other than Velodyne produces comparable units in sufficient quantities to meet the growing demand.

Being the pick- and- shovel seller in the gold rush to a self- driving future is proving to be lucrative. Velodyne, which remains private, says revenue is expected to be about $2. It has set its sights on the billion- dollar sales mark, says Mike Jellen, Velodyne’s president, though he won’t say when it will reach that milestone. Hidden 3D Full Movie Part 1.

The company is ramping up production, following a $1. Baidu and Ford last year. It was the first outside money into the company since Hall raised $2.

Velodyne won’t disclose its valuation, but an estimate by Forbes, based on expected revenue, suggests a market value of about $2 billion. Hall is said to own more than 5.

Jellen says an IPO is likely in “the 2. Velodyne is working to fully automate its San Jose megafactory. But Hall is already thinking bigger.

He wants to increase Li. DAR production capacity from thousands of sensors a year to at least a million by next year. To do that, he’s busy transforming Vel­o­dyne’s new San Jose factory into a giant robot itself: A fully automated megafactory that speeds up production while reducing the cost of his devices to a level rivals can’t match. Think of it as a scaled- down version of Elon Musk’s “machine that makes the machine”, as the Tesla founder has described his famed Gigafactory and next- generation plants. While an automated facility won’t be making Teslas until at least 2.

Hall wants his to be fully robotic by next year. If he pulls it off, Velodyne will be at the forefront of two seismic shifts in tech: Cars that drive themselves and factories that need human technicians and programmers but no assembly workers. Here’s the goal,” Hall says. Can you run your factory with the lights off? If you can do that, then you can actually make this stuff in the United States.”hall may be a tech mogul in the making, but he remains the quintessential engineer, someone who is most at home tinkering in a lab and typically dressed in a faded blue Oxford shirt, chinos and running shoes. He’s often terse when the subject turns to himself, but his eyes light up when he discusses things like his 1.

Boston machine shop, which made specialty parts for clients such as Raytheon and Harvard Medical School. Hall grew up in Connecticut, the son of an engineer who built nuclear power plants and the grandson of a physicist who in the 1. It was his grandfather who had helped Hall, as a teenager, set up his own workshop, where, among other things, he made a motorised bicycle and a “really loud” guitar amplifier.

He studied mechanical engineering at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University during the tumultuous early 1. After college he moved to Boston to open a shop to build parts for tech, medical and industrial companies. The projects were interesting and required creativity, but the anonymity of the work was frustrating.

He decided he needed to move into consumer products. If I walk down the street sometime in the future and yell out my brand name, every now and then I’ll find somebody that has heard of me,” he recalls thinking. In the early 1. 98. Hall moved to the Bay Area to get into the audio business, which was booming. You could go to a stereo store, and they were always looking for something new,” he says. With backing from his family, he started making premium sub- woofers with a design (which he patented) that reduced distortion. He named the company Velodyne, in a nod to his passion for cycling.

His speakers, which cost between $2,0. I was able to make it louder and deeper than anybody had ever done before without it sounding like the speakers were going to fall apart,” he says.

His brother Bruce joined to handle sales. Business grew, and customers included Bay Area sports stars and the late Robin Williams. But competition in the audio business, particularly on price, became increasingly cutthroat, and by the late 1. Hall was again looking for something new.

As a diversion, he started making fighting robots for the cable show Robot Wars, and one of his creations finished second in a 2. But it was the DARPA Challenges—races for autonomous vehicles first held in the California desert and later in urban environments—that offered a more serious test. Starting in 2. 00. Hall experimented with a number of technologies, including cameras and lasers, and entered a vehicle in the 2. After recognising the limitations of cameras, Hall and others turned to Li. DAR, a technology used for mapping and surveying that took pictures and stitched them together into detailed maps.

It was his adaptation of Li. DAR into a roof- mounted unit with 6.

It was enabling for the kind of general driving we were going for,” says Whittaker. Using Hall’s Li. DAR, Whittaker’s Tartan Racing team won the $2 million prize in 2.

Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me [Updated]The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance. The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record- breaking $2. That post was briefly taken down, then republished.

Soon afterward, Anne- Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.” Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me: Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then- new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers.

This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network. I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes.

After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google. With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.

The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked.

Universal’ was the answer. So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2. 01. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non- disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes.

I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher- ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer. And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story. Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up.

Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.

And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know- how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google. Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet. I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google. Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep- sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non- disclosure agreement.

Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending. People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wroteaboutit, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today. As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it.

But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network. Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself. Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums.

It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields. Lynn and the rest of the team that left New America Foundation plan to establish a new nonprofit to continue their work. For now, they’ve launched a website called “Citizens Against Monopoly” that tells their story.

It says that “Google’s attempts to shut down think tanks, journalists, and public interest advocates researching and writing about the dangers of concentrated private power must end.”It’s safe to say they won’t be receiving funding from Google. Update, September 1, 1: 5. Yesterday, we asked Google’s communications team for a response to this story.